Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who know exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a copy.
The Other Half of the Genome
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is «the one that makes pollen», and for a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is selected with the same care as the mother.
A male passes on growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those qualities less since it does not produce a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected genes.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after a couple of rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different forms.
That is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses surface: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but absent in the selected clone disappear out of the population entirely. A decade of this produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to create something different discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and it only exists as long as people keep growing it.
Reading a Male Plant
Guides on selecting females are everywhere; advice on picking males is rare, because most people never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone making seed, these are the signs breeders look for.
- Stability. Any male that also shows female pistils under normal conditions is rejected without exception; that trait is the last thing anyone wants carrying forward.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong scent indicates it carries the resin genes that are worth keeping.
- Restraint. Males that dump huge quantities of pollen all at once are frequently also the less desirable genetically; many breeders prefer steady producers.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before the female is receptive.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A mistake new regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the range and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: stature, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, tolerance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of selected parents that are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding chosen parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and here the choices multiply. Three approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Open pollination. Allow every male reach every female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.
- Backcross. Cross a selected seedling back to one of its parents to fix a specific trait. It tightens the genetics quickly and is useful when a single parent has something worth concentrating and the other brought mainly vigour.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, every other plant else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of the two selected plants and express narrower spread than the original pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.
Each of these require only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making requires.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
Some lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people keeping them regard the population as the entire point, and selfing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. There will be too flavours and chemistry that do not appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
None of the above turns regular seed into the right option for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the category no service.
A grower with room for three plants who needs each one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to inspect the plants every day around the onset of flower, because a late male in a small space ruins the whole crop within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a known clone-only cut reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to hold onto and eventually to produce something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is safely left where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain parcels with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or both is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.